http://www.elsiedeeproject.com/Default.aspx The Elsie Dee Project is all about having fun and enjoying life. Well maybe there's a bit more to it than that... we like to believe in the freedom of music while we go about exploring new avenues of musical expression. The Elsie Dee Project is dedicated not only to the diffusion of poetry, but also to the exploration of the musical formulas which one could call the 'lowest common denominator'. Copyright 2007 - 2011 Pierre Voyer and Boyd Williams SOCAN http://www.elsiedeeproject.com/images/Arthur_Michault.jpg http://www.elsiedeeproject.com/Default.aspx en Song 41 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Osito Rey. No one knows for sure who is Oscar Guillermo Reis Ortega, better known as Osito Rey, the prince of slam in Central America. He tells so many different stories about his origins and his whereabouts - how he was abandoned as a child and how he came by, always in a very unusual way. He was introduced to us by Dwight Edwards and Arthur Michaud who both worked with him on the literary project 100 sonnets 1000 loves of the group ION. In La primera razón, he declares his love to his country of adoption, Costa Rica. Song 42 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Fernando Pessoa. It is impossible to verify if this very popular text is really by Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). First of all, the style and content have nothing in common with the works of the famous Portuguese poet, but then again he left an incredible amount of unpublished material, signed by no less than 17 heteronyms. The fact is: the message it conveys could not be simpler and clearer. And since we wanted to thank our many Brazilian fans by recording a song in their language, it fit the bill perfectly. Song 43 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Osito Rey Osito Rey gave us this poem, first published under the title Bimbo mi cielo and signed by his early pseudonym Izi Laidel. And we turned it into our most happy sounding song. It is about his love for a motorcycle queen from Puntarenas. By the sound of it, they were riding together across the Milky Way. Song 44 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Jean Cocteau. Jean Cocteau is one of those artists whose name is far better known as their work. As he lived many great artists Paris in the first half of the twentieth century, he was friends with of the time: Picasso, Satie, Stravinsky, Proust, etc. He was a poet, graphic artist, musician and one of the most influential film maker of that era. His poetry mixes sharp modernism with elegant neoclassicism. He was one of the first to use the airplane and motorcycle as poetic themes. One of his last poems says: "Sometimes at night, the lost traveler sees a good light, and runs, his heart filled with joy, towards the ogre's house". Le Train musical is all about statues in a park murdering people...Typical Cocteau! Even though he was never a member of the Surrealist group led by André Breton, his poetry was always what Surrealism was about. Song 45 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Dwight E. Edwards. Once again D.E.Edwards builds a metaphorical conceit in which erotic and esoteric twists are easily confused. Is it an ode to the free life in wilderness or a hymn to self sacrifice in the green war? In this song, the Elsie Dee Project comes through as a singing duet, and that6 certainly opens a door to a whole lot of musical possibilities. Song 46 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Lewis Carroll. For the third time the Elsie Dee Project has fallen for the absolute charm of Lewis Carroll. This time, we used part of a poem taken from his Phantasmagoria. It is a kind of humoristic ars poetica, as light sounding as it is deep and «heavy» in content. As one the main nonsensical poets, Lewis Carroll gives us here the secret of endless meaning. Some twenty years after his death, the French surrealists started playing literary games using the same method of writing not to convey conventional meaning but to create new meanings, as did the Socrates for Victorian nerdy girls. And so did some of the poets of the OULIPO workshop (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle). Song 47 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Arthur Michault. Arthur Michault writes modern poetry with old words. He has made a constant use of folklore and medieval material. This was the first song we recorded with our new sound - so to speak - it has a reggae feel to it. The title is a word game referring to two popular expressions in French: rond de chien (the kind of circle a dog makes when sleeping) and chien de fusil (the handle of a rifle). Song 48 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Charles Baudelaire. This sonnet is one of the most famous poems in French. Charles Baudelaire was a romantic dandy, translator of Edgar A. Poe and Thomas de Quincey, but he was also a hard worker and he kept rewriting his poems until they reached gold sounding perfection. His verses have the highest technical quality imaginable. It is about the albatross. How clumsy it is when out of its natural comfort zone, his majestic flight! How cruel are the sailors with the poor bird, torturing him on the deck! But the poet knows that being like the albatross he has his place in the sky. Song 49 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Jack T. Hammer. Jack T Hammer has always been on the edge of something or another. He had given us Freeze last year, now he is more ambiguous, but still pushes the limits of civility and outrageousness. Some members of ION (a group of artists) have told us that they had a hard time pondering his natural 1his forgotten romantic soul. In Homecoming he manages to walk a straight line - so to speak - while adventuring out of his comfort zone. Song 50 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Vicente Aleixandre. In Spain, what is called the generation of 27 has given us Federico Garcia Lorca and Rafael Alberti (our song Invitación al Aire) and Vicente Aleixandre (1898-1984). First Surrealist, he later moved away from dream and created a very simple poetic language in order to express more accurately the life or everyday people. His poetry kept its highly elegant style, but it opened up to the universality of sensuality. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1977. Song 31 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Dwight E. Edwards. Dwight E. Edwards was born in Duncan?s Cove, Nova Scotia (1954). His mother was a Danish harpist struggling to get by. Playing the high society venues her instrument called for was not easy, even if she extended her artistic territory to New-Brunswick, Newfoundland and Maine. His father was an out of work fisherman: he had been badly traumatized by a blue whale who he claimed had words with on a stormy night off the shores of Sable Island. But he had to be drunk that night too, since he was all the time when home. Song 32 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Jean Genet. Genet was always fond of ceremonies and rituals and being outlawed was not a burden for him, it was an ideal greatly sought after Song 33 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Dylan Thomas. This Welsh poet?s poetic power is almost incomparable. His style is unique, blending traditional rhythms and intensely personal imagery in riddle-like knots of wisdom and rage, love and despair, faith and the humbling waves of the ever beating heart of the sea. Song 34 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by José Martí. When you hear, high and loud, the call of wilderness in the midst of highly civilized poetry, discreetly seeping through the most innocent form of well tamed academic poise, you can be sure you have entered the realm of Romanticism. Though he spent most of his life in exile, he took an active part in the Cuban revolution of the late nineteenth century. Song 35 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Friedrich Nietzsche. When he was 25, he was best friend with the 50 years old Richard Wagner. They were both writers as well as composers. The music and the philosophy of the twentieth century would not have been the same without them. But even in the best friendship, there is no room for two giants. Song 36 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Jack T. Hammer. His first attempts at poetry were rap revival of old English masters. He almost made the Guinness book of records with his non-stop rendition of Percy Bysshe Shelley?s The Revolt of Islam. Song 37 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Arthur Michault. Gabriel Pariseau was born at L'Île Ronde in 1949. His precocious neo-romantic poetry is still very much impregnated with post-modern irony. Something like the tragical fragrance of blue flowers . Song 38 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Renaldo Chastefleur. Born in Paris in 1944, Renaldo Chastefleur, the son of a Chilean musician and a famous Frensh contralto who toured the world non-stop, he spent most of his childhood on the road, but never got to see his father?s native Tarapacá, the Parinacota volcano?s reflection in the clear water of lake Chungará. Song 39 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Arthur Rimbaud. Of all the so called "damned poets" of the late nineteenth century, Arthur Rimbaud is without a doubt the best known. And this has less to do with the literary superiority of his work than with life story. Song 40 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Nicolás Guillén. This famous Cuban poet has witnessed his people?s sufferings as well as its achievements. But you don?t have to be Cuban and you don?t have to know all the historical details of the events he took part in to appreciate the bitter caress of his poetry. Song 21 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Jules Supervielle. Jules Supervielle (1889-1957) was born in Uruguay. Even though he moved back to Pau (France) and lived all his life in Paris, the mostly sweet memories of his South-American childhood kept nourishing his poetry as it evolved into a kind of everyday mysticism, a highly sophisticated vision shyly cocooned in a thoroughly "simple" and conventional poetic form. About his numerous publications he said something very dear to Elsie Dee?s own work: "I barely have known fear of commonplace (...) but most certainly fear of incomprehension". Song 22 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Emperor Yuraku. This first Japanese song by the Elsie Dee Project is made of six tankas (short poems of five lines of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables) related by a common theme: the mono no aware or "feeling of things". They are sometimes attributed to the legendary emperor Yuraku, but as we know more about them since the German scholar H.J. Klaproth has translated them and made them available to the western world, we realize they originate from the ancient Japanese oral tradition kept in the Manyoshu. Song 23 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Rafael Alberti. Rafael Alberti, born in Cadiz in 1902, belongs to the generation of 1927 and is identified with the Spanish Renaissance literature and played an important role in their access to modernity. Song 24 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Henri Michaux. Elsie Dee here uses only the beginning of one of the most famous and most beautiful poems of this misfit of French speaking literature. Familiar with the morbidity and the suffocating lack of differentiation, Henri Michaux sometimes bursts into frenzies of abundant details and minute descriptions. Song 25 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Gabriela Mistral. Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) preceded Neruda in Chile poetic adventure. Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945, she has also worked in the field of education. Elsie Dee has a kind of crush for this strong woman who was called at birth Lucila Godoy y Aclayaga. Her pseudonym reminds Elsie of one of her four grandmothers and the street where she lives. As one of our grandmothers was named Gabriela and we live on Mistral street here in Canada. Song 26 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman is another lover of simplicity, but of a fiercer kind of robust simplicity. No lace making, but sophisticated nakedness. People who prefer daylight to romantic moonshine, the early risers of happiness, will easily identify with this violent optimist and soon forgive him his naive narcissism. Moving awhile is a patchwork Elsie Dee made out of bits of much longer poems. Song 27 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by William Shakespeare. William Shakespeare is too notorious to add anything new about him, but his sonnets and poems in general are certainly the least known part of his work. The single theme of the sonnets is the passage of time and its harm on the love that, as we have learned through experience, never doth runs smooth. A sentence from Marcel Proust illustrates, in concentrated, the two-mile fifty-six towards one hundred fifty-four sonnets trying to express: "And what would be the wrinkles and circles under the eyes if it wasn?t for the sufferings of the heart". Song 28 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Baudelaire. Elsie Dee insisted that this About "album" had to include a poem by Baudelaire, the master of French symbolism, for he is, among all the dead poets we pray on, one of the most faithful visitors. And she also wanted to bring out the "happy" side of a poet mostly known for his frequent displays of «spleen» and morbidity. Song 29 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Taliesin. The Song of Taliesin is to Welsh culture what the Kalevala is the Finnish culture or what Deuteronomy is to the Judeo-Christian culture: an alphabet which is also a calendar where each line is a step (moon) whose name is that of a tree. Elsie has added a few repetitions so to give this poem an air of sacred jingle. Song 30 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Luis de Góngora. Luis de Góngora y Agorte (1561-1627), born in Cordoba, is the artist of the Spanish Golden Age, whose name became forever attached to Baroque art, the stylistic convolutions of his verses are of equal to that gilded ornamental Byzantine art and draped lush Italian mannerist. In his two "Solitudes", he staged a pilgrim, cynical cruelty of the court and shipwrecked among simple peasants, who sings the beauty of rustic life. Song 11 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Gabriel Pariseau. Gabriel Pariseau was born at L'Île Ronde in 1949. This poem was inspired by a jogger in the midst of trafic down-town Montreal. The suffocating car-drivers take part in a dreamed explosion involving everything... and the jogger still runs. Song 12 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Pablo Neruda. Pablo Neruda was born in Parral, Chile, Naftali Reyes has published under the pseudonyme Neruda ( borrowed to a tchech poet Jan Neruda ) more than a hundred books of poetry. Socialist and patriot, he has worked mostly to reconciliate poetry and the people. He was given the Nobel prize for Literature in 1971. Oda al hombre sencillo is one of the Odas elementales, it is highly representative of this poet of transfigured everydayness. The film Il postino and the novel Une ardente patience by Sepulveda are evocations of the poet's retreat in Isla negra. Song 13 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Lewis Carroll. Lewis Carroll pseudonyme Charles L. Dodgson, was born in Daresbury in 1832. A celebrated intellectual, he is especially known for Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. He left many poems including the masterpiece The Hunting of the Snark. Song 14 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Oscar Wilde. The Ballad of the Redding Geole is certainly one of the sadest poem this witty man has written. It is full of gore and morbidity, but it is also a very touching look life gone by while one was dancing and frivolously enjoying the profound superficiality of life. A short extract of this long poem has become Elsie Dee's song "The Gallows". Song 15 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Pablo Neruda. Pablo Neruda was born in Parral, Chile, Naftali Reyes has published under the pseudonyme Neruda ( borrowed to a tchech poet Jan Neruda ) more than a hundred books of poetry. Socialist and patriot, he has worked mostly to reconciliate poetry and the people. He was given the Nobel prize for Literature in 1971. Oda al hombre sencillo is one of the Odas elementales, it is highly representative of this poet of transfigured everydayness. The film Il postino and the novel Une ardente patience by Sepulveda are evocations of the poet's retreat in Isla negra. Song 16 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Eugène Grindel. Paul Eluard has published under the pseudonyme Paul Eluard (name of his maternal grand-mother) numeours books of poetry. He was one of the most prolific amongst the frensh surrealists, and one of the most constant. A simple vocabulary at the service of a fertile imagination and an equalitarian ideology. Elsie Dee made up the song Lumière unique by putting together extracts from Poésie ininterrompue. Song 17 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by François Villon. Eventhough his life was not that of a role model (he robbed rich people and even killed a priest in a fight), his influence on other poets was huge and still lives on. He is the undeniable master of the ballad. Song 18 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Edward Elstin Cummings. E. E. Cummings was born in Cambridge (Massachusetts) in 1894. His travels to France in the early XXth century nurrished his appetite for modernism. Taking a defenite step away from symbolism, he created an innovative, playfull and nontheless strictly formal poetry. Song 19 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Rubén Darío. Song 20 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Sylvain Garneau. Sylvain Garneau (1930-1953)was born in Montreal, this poet mixes modernism and romantic tradition. His verses recall Rimbaud and Nelligan. He comitted suicide at the age of 23. Song 1 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Charles d'Orléans. Charles d'Orléans was born in Paris in 1493. Taken prisoner by the English, he lived in England from 1415 to 1440. Back in his homeland, he had an elegant and refined court life in Blois. There he maried Marie de Clèves who gave him the future king of France Louis XII. Since then, this charming rondeau rolls without gathering any moss... Song 2 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Charles Algernon Swinburne. Charles Algernon Swinburne was born in London ( England) in 1837. Even if his victorian contemporaries were outraged by his mystical appraoch of morbidity and his unconventional use of sexual imagery, he remains an absolute master of the English meter. Taken from his Hymn to Proserpine Song 3 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Paul Verlaine. Paul Verlaine was born in Metz ( France) in 1844. Master of the musical verse and of the speech-like tone, his work is as profound as it appears shallow to "seriously" realist critics. Song 4 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Gabriel Pariseau. Gabriel Pariseau was born at L'Île Ronde in 1949. His precocious neo-romantic poetry is still very much impregnated with post-modern irony. Something like the tragical fragrance of blue flowers . Song 5 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics byLewis Carroll. Lewis Carroll pseudonyme Charles L. Dodgson, was born in Daresbury in 1832. A celebrated intellectual, he is especially known for Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. He left many poems including the masterpiece The Hunting of the Snark. Song 6 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Arthur Michault. Arthur Michault was born in L'Ile Noire in 1922. Post-dada experimental poet, we tend to see nowadays in his voluntarily opacified "poèmes-machines" a prefiguratioin of punk. Song 7 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Gabriel Pariseau. Gabriel Pariseau was born at L'Île Ronde in 1949. His precocious neo-romantic poetry is still very much impregnated with post-modern irony. Something like the tragical fragrance of blue flowers . Song 8 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Edward Elstin Cummings. E. E. Cummings was born in Cambridge (Massachusetts) in 1894. His travels to France in the early XXth century nurrished his appetite for modernism. Taking a defenite step away from symbolism, he created an innovative, playfull and nontheless strictly formal poetry. Song 9 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Charles Algernon Swinburne. Charles Algernon Swinburne was born in London ( England) in 1837. Even if his victorian contemporaries were outraged by his mystical appraoch of morbidity and his unconventional use of sexual imagery, he remains an absolute master of the English meter. Taken from his tragedy Atalanta in Calydon Song 10 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Constantin Cavafy. Constantin Cavafy was born in Alexandria in 1863. Writing in Greek, he shows as much scholarly rigor as Mediterranean sensuality... This song was built starting from a translation in French by Marguerite Yourcenar of the poem entitled: Portrait of a young man of twenty-three years, painted by a comrade of his age, an amateur artist.